WIRED's Top Stories in March: More Than Just Facebook

In addition to the Cambridge Analytica controversy, WIRED readers wanted to know about a sinking San Francisco, the engineering behind the Florida bridge collapse, and more.This month, The New York Times, alongside The Guardian and The Observer, broke the news that Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm that worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, and its related company, Strategic Communications Laboratories, took data from 50 million Facebook users and secretly kept it. It was a huge story, and one WIRED covered extensively. But it wasn't the only thing captivating readers' attention. In fact, the most-read story of March came from security writer Lily Hay Newman, who wrote about GitHub surviving the largest-ever DDoS attack. On February 28, "1.35 terabits per second of traffic hit the developer platform GitHub all at once. It was the most powerful distributed denial of service attack recorded to date. ...After eight minutes, attackers relented and the assault dropped off." Newman described how GitHub prepared itself to be able to fend off the attack of this nature. “We modeled our capacity based on fives times the biggest attack that the internet has ever seen,” Josh Shaul, vice president of web security at Akamai told WIRED hours after the GitHub attack ended. “So I would have been certain that we could handle 1.3 Tbps, but at the same time we never had a terabit and a half come in all at once. It’s one thing to have the confidence. It’s another thing to see it actually play out how you’d hope."
Below, that piece and nine more of the most-read stories WIRED published this month.